Alumni Futures

Alumni Futures readers who follow me on Twitter , and those connected to me via LinkedIn may already have seen the big personal news I shared last week: I am thrilled to announce that I am returning to Brown University as Vice President for Alumni Relations. It's exciting for me not only because I pursued my undergraduate education at Brown, but al... so because Brown's alumni office is where I started my higher education career almost 30 years ago! As assistant director in 1989, I began learning the basics of alumni engagement, and by the time I moved on to the University of Michigan, seven years later, alumni relations had become a much more professionalized business. Today the profession is mature, but it continues to change, more rapidly and in more surprising ways than ever. I'm eager for the opportunity to address those challenges at a great university with a proud tradition of alumni outreach. I will be wrapping up a few unfinished consulting projects in the coming weeks, and I will take this opportunity to thank my colleagues and clients at Grenzebach Glier & Associates . I've probably learned more from my consulting clients since 2015 than they have learned from me, and I am very grateful to have had the opportunity to serve the advancement profession in that role. I will start my new position at Brown on December 3, 2018. Here's the official announcement: For a long time, the word alumni referred only to graduates of schools and universities. Over time, however, we have increasingly used the term to describe individuals who share almost any specific past experience. Recently, Ive been privileged to work on a project that revealed emerging practices in alumni engagement for charitable foundations, scholarly and artistic residency programs, fellowships, and other nonprofit organizations. Funded by a grant from The Rockefeller Foundation , I led the creation of an alumni outreach strategy for the Bellagio Center in Italy. For decades, the Bellagio Center has hosted residents and conference participants in ...Read More